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Everything she knew about her wife was false — a faux biography finds the 'truth'

Maureen Corrigan

To those readers who prize "relatability," Catherine Lacey's latest novel may as well come wrapped in a barbed wire book jacket. There is almost nothing about Biography of X , as this novel is called, that welcomes a reader in — least of all, its enigmatic central character, a fierce female artist who died in 1996 and who called herself "X," as well as a slew of other names. Think Cate Blanchett as Tár, except more narcicisstic and less chummy.

When the novel opens, X's biography is in the early stages of being researched by her grieving widow, a woman called CM, who comes to realize that pretty much everything she thought she knew about her late wife was false. The fragmented biography of X that CM slowly assembles is shored up by footnotes and photographs, included here.

Real-life figures also trespass onto the pages of this biography to interact with X — who, I must remind you, is a made-up character. Among X's friends are Patti Smith , the former Weather Underground radical Kathy Boudin , and the beloved New York School poet, Frank O'Hara .

As if this narrative weren't splintered enough, Lacey's novel is also a work of alternate history, in which we learn that post-World War II America divided into three sections: The liberal Northern Territory where Emma Goldman served as FDR's chief of staff (don't let the dates trip you up); the Southern Territory, labeled a "tyrannical theocracy," and the off-the-grid "Western Territory." A violent "Reunification" of the Northern and Southern Territories has taken place, but relations remain hostile.

Feeling put off by all this experimental genre-bending? Don't be. For as much as Lacey has written a postmodern miasma of a novel about deception and the relationship of the artist to their work, she's also structured that novel in an old-fashioned way: via a Scheherazade -like sequence of stories. Most of these stories are about the charismatic X's life and fabrications; all of them are arresting in their originality; and, the final story that CM is led to, housed in a storage facility, is devastating in its calculated brutality.

But let's return to the beginning. In what CM calls the "boneless days" in the aftermath of of X's death, she tells us that:

"It wasn't a will to live that kept me alive then, but rather a curiosity about who else might come forward with a story about my wife. ... And might I — despite how much I had deified and worshipped X and believed her to be pure genius — might I now accept the truth of her terrible, raw anger and boundless cruelty? It was the ongoing death of a story, dozens of second deaths, the death of all those delicate stories I lived in with her."

I hesitate to mention any of revelations CM stumbles upon in the course of her research into X — a person CM says, "lived in a play without intermission in which she cast herself in every role." Watching those bizarre costume changes take place on these pages is part of the pleasure of reading this novel. It's not giving much away, though, to say that one of the earliest shockers here is that X, who arrived in New York in the 1970s ready to create experimental music with David Bowie and pricey conceptual art out of boulders, actually was born Carrie Lu Walker into the repressive Handmaid's Tale world of the Southern Territory.

Hiding her own identity as X's widow, CM travels to the Southern Territory to interview X's parents — a risky move in a land where women who deviate from the repressive norm are still stoned to death. During this research trip and the many that follow, CM also investigates the mystery of her own metamorphosis: namely, how did she — a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist — allow herself to be drawn into what Emily Dickinson called the "soft Eclipse" of being a wife, the very same kind of wife the folks in the Southern Territory would approve of? X may not be relatable, but, as we come to know her, the duped CM certainly is.

"The trouble with knowing people," CM says at one point, "is how the target keeps moving." The same could be said of Lacey's brilliant, destabilizing novel. Just when you think you have a handle on Biography of X , it escapes the stack of assumptions where you thought you'd put it, like a profile or an obituary you'd started reading in yesterday's tossed-out paper.

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Reviews of Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

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• Speculative, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Alt. History
• 1980s & '90s
• Dealing with Loss
• Physical & Mental Differences
• Music and the Arts

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From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone's good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora's box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification. A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X's widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X's peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X's defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife's deceptions were far crueler than she imagined. Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

The publisher was unable to provide an excerpt for this book.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• In a Guardian review, Marcel Theroux called Biography of X "a lovingly made facsimile of a nonfiction book." Discuss the structure of Biography of X . How does Lacey employ methods typically used in nonfiction? Why do you think she choose to approach her subject in this way? What's the effect of doing so?
• What did you think of CM? What do you think attracted her to X initially? Describe her relationship with X. Do you think their relationship works? Explain your answer.
• What's the effect of having images interspersed throughout the book? Did they enhance your understanding of the events described? If so, how? Were there other images that you would have liked to see? What were they?
• Maureen Corrigan described Biography of X as "a...
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As a series of stories about an eccentric and bizarre person, Biography of X has plenty of moments of brilliance. The central premise that intrigued me was the question suggested by CM's quest: How well do we really know those we love, those we've chosen to spend our lives with? But CM's situation is so hyper-specific, her wife so willfully, intentionally unknowable, a literal master of disguise, that it lacks some of the universal appeal that might have otherwise invited readers to reflect on their own relationships. What holds the novel together is suspense. As CM finds out more about her wife, it becomes clear that X had a history of using and manipulating people, and even the occasional act of violence... continued

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‘Biography of X’ Rewrites a Life Story and an American Century

Catherine Lacey’s new novel follows a polarizing artist through a fractured country.

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By Dwight Garner

BIOGRAPHY OF X, by Catherine Lacey

The narrator of “Biography of X,” the new Catherine Lacey novel, is a journalist named C.M. Lucca who worked for a Village Voice-like newspaper in New York City during the 1980s. C.M. has a cool tone and a lonely intelligence; she’s a solitary spirit. Her voice is clear but worn, like beach glass. There’s some early Renata Adler in it, and some Janet Malcolm.

C.M. was married, when young, to a sculptor named Henry. “Never love an artist,” Patricia Highsmith reports being told. “When it comes time for them to work, they’ll look at you as though they didn’t know you, and kick you out into the cold.” Henry never kicked C.M. into the cold, literally or metaphorically. But when C.M. leaves him and marries X — a polarizing, multi-hyphenate female performance artist — the heartbreak and indignities mount.

C.M.’s voice, with its withdrawn quality and intimations of ruin, is an odd one to preside over a novel this sprawling and ambitious, this strange and dystopian and vividly imagined. “Biography of X” reimagines the American century while tapping into our evergreen fascination with the downtown art world between 1970 and 1995. It’s a hard book to get a handle on.

Let’s begin by calling it a novel about warring biographies. X did not want a biography written after her death, but it was inevitable one would appear. She was almost comically dexterous and plugged in, a Zelig-like combination of Kathy Acker, Patti Smith, Susan Sontag, Edie Sedgwick, Laurie Anderson and Nan Goldin, most of whom appear in this book.

X had a 1994 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art; she wrote seminal novels under various pseudonyms; one of her scripts was filmed by Wim Wenders; she produced records for Tom Waits and David Bowie (and wrote the lyrics to “Heroes”). She discovered and recorded a singer who resembles Karen Dalton. She corresponded with Denis Johnson and was photographed by Annie Leibovitz; she crashed Andy Warhol’s parties and spurned Warren Beatty’s advances. She was everything everywhere all at once. She would never use a door if a window were available.

By late 1996, X is dead. The biography that emerges a year later, by a man named Theodore Smith, infuriates C.M. It’s lightweight and literal, and it’s a joy to watch C.M. attack it. She calls it “radiant with inanity.” She says it reads as if Smith “has mixed up a palette of pastels and given himself permission to brighten a Rembrandt.” She notes that he gets crucial facts wrong.

This is a magpie novel, one that borrows snatches of text, that tinkers with reputations, that moves historical figures around in time. When C.M. writes that Smith’s biography is “page by page, line by line, without interruption, worthless,” some readers will recognize these words, altered just slightly, from Adler’s 1980 takedown, in The New York Review of Books , of Pauline Kael. I’m on the Kael side of this divide, and this repurposing, linking Kael with a hack biographer, rubbed me the wrong way, but that’s life, and it’s nit-picking, and it’s a whole other freeway.

C.M. sets out, in her grief, to report her own biography, a project she refers to as “a wrong turn taken and followed.” Her reporting takes her out into an America that is recognizable, but barely. Like Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” this is a mighty work of counterfactual history.

There is room here only to sketch the outlines of the world that Lacey convincingly projects onto the page. The country was divided, in the “Great Disunion of 1945,” into Northern and Southern Territories, and a wall was constructed between them. The South has become a tyrannical theocracy: Women wear long dresses, the radio plays only church hymns. Lacey employs photographs to ghostly, Sebaldian effect. One image is a satellite photograph of America at night, in which the Southern Territory is completely dark; it’s like looking at a nighttime image of North and South Korea. Lacey spoons out the horror:

On that autumn day in 1945, the quiet orderliness began. Phone lines were snipped. Radio stations were shut down — some by violence and executions, others by willing consent. Local newspaper production ceased. Electricity and running water were rationed in the small number of homes that had any to begin with. Sunday church attendance became mandatory. Libraries were purged of unlawful texts. Schoolhouses were abandoned — all education took place in churches now. Armed guards stood attention at the few places where it was possible to cross the border; snipers were stationed along the rest of the wall. No one was allowed in or out, and those who dared to defy these orders were shot dead.

Lacey, whose previous novels include “ Nobody Is Ever Missing ” and “ The Answers ,” has long been interested in characters who grew up in religion-deranged families or were otherwise off the grid. We learn that X grew up in the Southern Territory — born Caroline Luanna Walker, in 1945 — and that she was a rare escapee.

Many of the almost throwaway details in “Biography of X” could spawn novels of their own. The anarchist Emma Goldman became F.D.R.’s chief of staff. The Vietnam War never happened. There has been a Bernie Sanders presidency. Kathy Boudin, of the Weather Underground, was among the dissidents who escaped with X from the South.

There’s much more. In 1943, a mob from the South stormed an art opening and killed Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky and Alexander Calder. The poet Frank O’Hara, on the other hand, gets to live. In this book he was only injured, not killed, when hit by a Jeep on Fire Island. By the time C.M. commences her reporting, the wall has fallen and the two sides (there is also a Western Territory) are attempting a difficult reconciliation.

There’s more enhancing going on at the bottom of the pages. Many of this book’s facts arrive with footnotes, citing old and imagined articles and interviews from a roll call of sophisticated writers and critics (Merve Emre, Naomi Fry, Durga Chew-Bose, Hermione Hoby, Michelle Dean), some of whom would have been toddlers or not yet born at the time of their writing. Lacey also shoehorns a funny lament about health insurance into her endnotes.

By its second half, “Biography of X” has begun to drag somewhat. We follow C.M. on interview after interview, and the form is too conventional; all that’s missing is a Peter Coyote voice-over. Some of X’s pretentiousness — she is given to statements like “To be rebellious and to distrust rebellion is the plight of the tragic artist” — bleeds over into the book itself.

But you will already be locked in. This is a major novel, and a notably audacious one. Lacey is pulling from a deep reservoir. Beneath the counterfactuals, and the glamour and squalor of Manhattan nightlife, and the mythologies bought and sold, she’s telling a love story of a broken sort. C.M. is flinging rope between her present and past. This book is about facing, and accepting, the things you didn’t want to know.

BIOGRAPHY OF X | By Catherine Lacey | Illustrated | 394 pp. | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $28

Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008. His most recent book is “Garner’s Quotations: A Modern Miscellany.” More about Dwight Garner

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Biography of X by Catherine Lacey review – who is this mysterious artist?

An impressive and enchantingly strange novel plays with genre, identity and politics in an alternate America

C elebrated for her novels, her art installations and her musical collaborations with David Bowie, Tom Waits and Tony Visconti, the artist known as X was, until her death in 1996, one of the more enigmatic cultural figures of the 20th century. She always refused to confirm her place or date of birth, and after she took the pseudonym “X” in 1982, it was never clear which if any of her previous identities – Dorothy Eagle, Clyde Hill, Caroline Walker, Bee Converse – corresponded to her actual name. This is a biography drawing on X’s archives and a range of interviews with the people closest to her, joining the dots about her background and exploring her difficult relationship with contemporary America. And it is, like X herself, entirely a work of fiction.

Catherine Lacey, the author of this haunting, genre-bending novel, has form investigating characters with mysterious identities. Her previous book, Pew , was a gothic fable set in America’s Bible belt, narrated by an unnamed protagonist whose race, gender and age are never established. Pew, so nicknamed because they are discovered sleeping in a church, mirrors the anxieties and fractures of the world they turn up in – a world that becomes progressively weirder as we read the novel.

Though it is structured in a similar way and drawn to the same themes, Biography of X is a stranger, more ambitious and more accomplished book. The conceit is that the book’s actual author is CM Lucca, X’s widow. Annoyed by the publication of an inaccurate biography of her late wife, Lucca has resolved to set the record straight. Complete with extensive bibliography, photographs, footnotes, images of X’s books and art, and even front matter that attributes the copyright to CM Lucca, 2005, Biography of X is presented to the reader as a simulacrum of a nonfiction work. This is an enchantingly strange proposition and, like Pew, it only gets stranger.

First of all, as the prickly and somewhat self-involved CM Lucca attempts to explain her motives for writing the book, you are troubled by little oddities in the narrative. Pretty soon it becomes clear that the events of the book take place on an alternative timeline of US history in a world very different from our own. The election of a female socialist president in the 1940s has led to the secession of some of the southern states. These so-called Southern Territories have become a dictatorial theocracy complete with their own morality police. Meanwhile the north has pursued a range of radically progressive policies – a kind of wish list of enlightened thinking that ought to have created a utopia yet somehow hasn’t.

There’s something wondrous about the way the book backs into its high concept. While CM Lucca is fretting over the meaning of her relationship with X and settling scores with the other biography, a huge vista opens up behind her. It’s like looking at a family photograph in which something truly extraordinary – an avalanche or alien invasion – is taking place in the background.

It turns out that X’s origins lie across the border, in the recently reunified (or conquered?) Southern Territories. Visiting them, like a traveller to North Korea, the narrator is assigned a Travel Mentor and begins tracking down X’s family members and childhood friends. This parallel reality is evoked with brilliant specificity. One tiny example: when the narrator visits a house there, a man briefly enters the room to ask his sister for a glass of milk. “A grown man unable to pour himself a glass of milk, I thought. This is the sort of person an authoritarian theocracy produces.”

The different versions of America – one where same-sex marriage has been legal for decades, another where it’s regarded as an abomination – are clearly extrapolations from our present. Yet the conflict between their mutually uncomprehending worlds is not fuel for a polemic but presented with thoughtfulness and nuance. “Their ability to love a concept as large and appealing as God was used against them again and again,” we read of the oppressed population in the theocratic South. It’s a great line that suggests links between the speculative world of the book and the victims of other utopian schemes.

As the book uncovers details of X’s past in the Southern Territories, it forces us to re-evaluate her art, which acquires more urgent and political overtones. X’s exploration of artistic freedom and refusal to be confined by any single identity seem very different in the light of her upbringing in a virtually totalitarian world. But the move to the north is not a happy ending. X remains a contrarian to the end, ruffling feathers, bracingly defending her right to inhabit multiple personas. “There was no con, there was no crime. There was only fiction,” she says. And as the book builds to its unexpected and yet somehow inevitable conclusion, the line between life and art becomes menacingly blurry.

At times I couldn’t tell the difference between the real and imagined characters. Among X’s acquaintances are a half-Russian New York socialite, Oleg Hall, who owes his fortune to his parents’ murder-suicide, and a folk musician called Connie Converse , who vanishes in mysterious circumstances, leaving a trove of unreleased recordings. Both seemed equally bizarre; only one of them is invented.

There is so much that’s impressive about this book. It makes you think afresh about America and American history. It roves over the muddy trenches of identity politics while saying things that are original and not parti pris. At its centre, X is a charismatic, tantalising figure who takes aim at all orthodoxies. My one quibble with the novel is that there’s a tendency to apostrophise too much about the puzzles of love, art and identity at the heart of the book. The courageous world-building and bold storytelling carry these themes without any need for additional rhetorical flourishes.

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It’s hard to locate influences, but one mention of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges made me think of his story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius . In this strange tale, objects from a fictional world penetrate our world and transform it. A lovingly made facsimile of a nonfiction book, Biography of X resembles a Tlönian artefact from a parallel reality. Though it may not change the world, it will leave the reader altered.

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Biography of X Paperback – March 19, 2024

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Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2023 by Time (#1) , Vulture, and Publishers Weekly , and one of the Best Books of 2023 by T he New York Times , the New Yorker, NPR, the Los Angeles Times , Vanity Fair , Esquire, the Chicago Tribune , Kirkus , Lit Hub , and Amazon . National Bestseller. Winner of the 2023 Brooklyn Library Prize, a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Lambda Literary Award, and longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. “A major novel, and a notably audacious one.” ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist. When X―an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter―falls dead in her office, her widow, CM, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM knows where X was born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, and which finally, in the present day, is being forced into an uneasy reunification. A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows CM as she traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America’s divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. At last, when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined. Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

• Print length 416 pages
• Language English
• Publication date March 19, 2024
• Dimensions 5.3 x 1.05 x 8.15 inches
• ISBN-10 1250321689
• ISBN-13 978-1250321688
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

"This is a major novel, and a notably audacious one. Lacey is pulling from a deep reservoir. Beneath the counterfactuals, and the glamour and squalor of Manhattan nightlife, and the mythologies bought and sold, she’s telling a love story of a broken sort. C.M. is flinging rope between her present and past. This book is about facing, and accepting, the things you didn’t want to know." ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times "Lacey imposes a truly outstanding narrative authority on her pseudo-biography . . . the audacity of this book . . . seems likely to bring her to a much wider audience. If this does mark Ms. Lacey’s deserved elevation to mainstream attention, she has accomplished it without diluting the vital qualities of confusion, yearning and mystery." ―Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal "[A] staggering achievement . . . [a] masterpiece about the slippery nature of art, identity, and truth." ―Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire "Brilliant, astonishing . . . The book is a marvelous centrifuge, in which political and cultural histories of the American 20th century collapse." ―Chris Kraus, The Washington Post "Genre-quaking . . . A true magnum opus . . . [X is] an unstable new element in the periodic table of literature." ―Hillary Kelly, The Atlantic "In its boldness of premise and execution, Biography of X goes above and beyond, under the river and through the woods. It flaunts world-building skills that the writers of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” wish they’d had . . . Lacey is one of the most fearless novelists writing today." ―Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times "Haunting, genre-bending . . . It’s like looking at a family photograph in which something truly extraordinary – an avalanche or alien invasion – is taking place in the background . . . A lovingly made facsimile of a nonfiction book, Biography of X resembles a Tlönian artefact from a parallel reality. Though it may not change the world, it will leave the reader altered." ―Marcel Theroux, The Guardian "Lacey has done such a brilliant job of making X impossible to envision, impossible to feel or grasp . . . There is an ambition in The Biography of X that’s thrilling not least because it shows how endless, how elastic and expansive―at a time when so much storytelling feels constricted, tight and close on a single consciousness―fiction can be." ―Lynn Steger Strong, The New Republic "A Scheherazade-like sequence of stories. Most of these stories are about the charismatic X's life and fabrications; all of them are arresting in their originality; and, the final story that CM is led to, housed in a storage facility, is devastating . . . Just when you think you have a handle on Biography of X , it escapes the stack of assumptions where you thought you'd put it, like a profile or an obituary you'd started reading in yesterday's tossed-out paper." ―Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air "Lacey’s fifth book bursts with urbane vitality. The author convinces us by the sheer inventiveness of her artifice . . . Biography of X is the author’s most ambitious and enjoyable novel yet, filled with the subversive humour and verve only hinted at in her previous books . . . Catherine Lacey is clear-eyed about human dependency and self-delusion." ―Jude Cook, TLS "a towering work that comments on, among things, art-world ridiculousness, the elasticity of identity, culture divides in the United States, and the fool’s errand of compressing a life into narrative . . . Beyond the book-as-book exercise, Lacy’s inventiveness when describing X’s various attention-grabbing exhibitions, and the genius visual annotations, Biography of X consistently stuns on a sentence-to-sentence basis. This is a wise, wise work." ― Rich Juzwiak, Jezebel " Lacey artfully blends historical anecdotes―X is seen penning songs for David Bowie and attending openings with Richard Serra―into her fictional universe, making uncomfortable connections between X’s fragile world and our own." ― The New Yorker "Bold and exhilarated, figuring itself out as it moves forward, an act of raucous creativity." ― Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, Minneapolis StarTribune "Brimming with negative capability, intrigue, and erudition, Biography of X is at once a tense, tongue-in-cheek cautionary tale for the United States and a robustly supported argument for the idea that biographical knowledge alters the reading of an artwork." ―Jenny Wu, Los Angeles Review of Books "Lacey is brilliant. As in her earlier fiction, she is thinking deeply about what we give up to other people when we love them . . . in Biography of X, she has reached a new level of understanding." ―Emma Alpern, Vulture " Biography of X is criminally good, building on [Lacey's] previous five books’ fascination with the mutability of self with kaleidoscopic depth and astonishing propulsion . . . What is most spectacular is Lacey’s sleight of hand, inviting us to become engrossed in the unknowability of others, while gently reminding us that we, too, are unknowable―even and especially to ourselves." ―Ayden LeRoux, BOMB "Sweeping, ambitious . . . too expansive to simply be called a novel . . . The book is a provocative project―one that mirrors and refracts our own cultural obsession with celebrity and our nation’s broken politics." ―Sammy Loren, Document "One of the most inventive works I’ve read in a long time, Catherine Lacey’s latest novel is a must-read for fans of ambitious, genre-bending literary fiction." ―David Vogel, Buzzfeed "Breathtaking in its scope and rigor, this unforgettable novel pushes contemporary fiction to dizzying heights. A triumph." ― Kirkus (starred review) "An audacious novel of art and ideas . . . The author also perfectly marries her [character's] history with her study of a shape-shifting artist, with X refashioning herself both to escape her ultraconservative homeland and to build a vehicle for her creative expression. This is brilliant." ― Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A dazzling literary chimera, at once an epic and chilling alternate history of the United States and an intimate portrait of a woman coming apart at the seams." ― BookPage (starred review) "A tour-de-force in literary and artistic realms, this engrossing story of breakaway artist X will challenge readers on many levels." ― Library Journal (starred review) "Lacey's tale is a lovely meditation on not only the mysteries of grief and love but also the equally mysterious ways of the creative process." ― Booklist "Sly, brilliant, philosophically acute, bitingly funny, and a pure joy to spend hours with . . . Suffice it to say that it feels fairly rare for a novel to be hugely intelligent and moving and fun in equal measure, but with Biography of X , Catherine Lacey somehow―magically―makes the nearly impossible look easy." ―Lauren Groff, author of Matrix "I'm not sure I know another novel that manages to be so many books at once: a biography revealing masks beneath masks and faces beneath faces, a quest narrative unsure of what it's seeking, an impossibly ambitious parable about art and the enigma of others, an alternate history of America that serves as an X-ray of our own fractured country. Biography of X is a profound novel about love and what it can license, about the toll―and maybe the con―of genius. Only Catherine Lacey could have written it." ― Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You " Biography of X is the most ambitious book I’ve ever read from a writer of my own generation. Epic world-building revealed through intimate emotion and dangerously honed sentences; a story that mixes fact and fiction to create a new register of truth, a register that belongs entirely to Catherine Lacey. I'm awed." ―Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby " Biography of X is a triumphant high-wire act: all the breadth of a 19th century classic with the propulsiveness of a psychological thriller. I stayed up too late, wishing to uncover X's secrets alongside the narrator." ― Sara Nović , author of True Biz

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador Paper (March 19, 2024)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250321689
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250321688
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.3 x 1.05 x 8.15 inches
• #1,678 in American Literature (Books)
• #2,060 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Catherine lacey.

Catherine Lacey is the author of five books— Biography of X, Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, Pew, and the story collection Certain American States. Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award.

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50 Great Book Club Discussion Questions For Any Book

Teresa Preston

Since 2008, Teresa Preston has been blogging about all the books she reads at Shelf Love . She supports her book habit by working as a magazine editor at a professional association in the Washington, DC, area, which is (in)conveniently located just a few steps from a used bookstore. When she’s not reading or editing, she’s likely to be attending theatre, practicing yoga, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer again, or doting on her toothless orange cat, Anya. Twitter: @teresareads

View All posts by Teresa Preston

I’ve been in a lot of book clubs, and I know it’s not always easy to get a conversation going on a book. I’ve found that the best book club discussion questions are ones that are open-ended and that get people to share their personal opinions. If you’re ready to start a book club , here are 50 of the best book club questions, for fiction and nonfiction alike. Find a printable list to bring to your meeting here !

How did I create this list of book club discussion questions? 

Simply put, I’ve assembled a list of the kinds of questions that are likely to get people talking. Most of these are non-specific and designed to work for any book. Although, of course, some will work better than others for particular books).

I’ve also included a few questions that are meant for specific types of books, like fiction or nonfiction. Just pick and choose the discussion questions that work best for you and your book group, and get the conversation going! Bring the printable questions along for help.

General Book Club Discussion Questions

1. What did you like best about this book?

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2. What did you like least about this book?

3. What other books did this remind you of?

4. Which characters in the book did you like best?

5. Which characters did you like least?

6. If you were making a movie of this book, who would you cast?

7. Share a favorite quote from the book. Why did this quote stand out?

8. What other books by this author have you read? How did they compare to this book?

9. Would you read another book by this author? Why or why not?

10. What feelings did this book evoke for you?

11. What did you think of the book’s length? If it’s too long, what would you cut? If too short, what would you add?

12. What songs does this book make you think of? Create a book group playlist together!

13. If you got the chance to ask the author of this book one question, what would it be?

14. Which character in the book would you most like to meet?

15. Which places in the book would you most like to visit?

16. What do you think of the book’s title? How does it relate to the book’s contents? What other title might you choose?

17. What do you think of the book’s cover? How well does it convey what the book is about? If the book has been published with different covers, which one do you like best?

18. What do you think the author’s purpose was in writing this book? What ideas was he or she trying to get across?

19. How original and unique was this book?

20. If you could hear this same story from another person’s point of view, who would you choose?

21. What artist would you choose to illustrate this book? What kinds of illustrations would you include?

22. Had you heard about the book before starting it? Do you think it was overhyped or should be celebrated more?

Book Club Discussion Questions for Fiction

23. Did this book seem realistic?

24. How well do you think the author built the world in the book?

25. Did the characters seem believable to you? Did they remind you of anyone?

26. Did the book’s pace seem too fast/too slow/just right?

27. If you were to write fanfic about this book, what kind of story would you want to tell?

28. Was the pacing— beginning, middle, and end— done well?

29. Which other character would have made an interesting protagonist?

30. Did the characters’ motives seem reasonable or a little far-fetched?

31. Sometimes books start off strong, but have endings that fall a little flat. Then there are books that are a little hard to get into at first, but are enjoyable after a while. How did you find this one?

32. If there were any twists or big reveals, how believable were they?

33. How did the setting progress the story?

34. Was there symbolism present? If so, what did you think of the message the author was trying to convey?

Book Club Questions for Nonfiction

35. What did you already know about this book’s subject before you read this book?

36. What new things did you learn?36. What questions do you still have?

38. What else have you read on this topic, and would you recommend these books to others?

39. What do you think about the author’s research? Was it easy to see where the author got his or her information? Were the sources credible?

40. Conveying research in a way that’s understandable and enjoyable to read for non-experts can be a challenge. How well do you feel the author did this? What do you think of their writing style?

Discussion Questions for Memoir

41. What aspects of the author’s story could you most relate to?

42. How honest do you think the author was being?

43. What gaps do you wish the author had filled in? Were there points where you thought he shared too much?

44. Think about the other people in the book besides the author. How would you feel to have been depicted in this way?

45. Why do you think the author chose to tell this story?

Book Club Discussion Questions for Short Story and Essay Collections

46. Which short story/essay did you like best?

47. Which short story/essay did you like least?

48. What similarities do these stories share? How do they tie together?

49. Do you think any of the stories could be expanded into a full-length book?

50. There have been many popular films that have been adapted from short stories. Which of these do you think would be well adapted into a show or movie?

Printable Book Club Questions

Download all of these in an easy book club printable here .

For more book club help, check out puntastic and fun book club names , some of the best book club books for 2022 , and how to start a book club .

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The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline

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• Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction
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Carmichael's Bookstore

Carmichael's community book club: the biography of x, event date: .

“A major novel, and a notably audacious one.” ?Dwight Garner,  The New York Times

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, CM, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Not even CM knows where X was born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, and which finally, in the present day, is being forced into an uneasy reunification. A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow,  Biography of X  follows CM as she traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America’s divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. At last, when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined. Pulsing with suspense and intellect,  Biography of X  is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

Biography of X: A Novel (Hardcover)

Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2023 by Time (#1) , Vulture, and Publishers Weekly , and one of the Best Books of 2023 by T he New York Times , the New Yorker, NPR, the Los Angeles Times , Vanity Fair , Esquire, the Chicago Tribune , Kirkus , Lit Hub , and Amazon .

Event Category Terms: 

Event summary: , find a book.

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Book Club Questions

The goal of your book club meeting is to have a fantastic discussion. In order to do this you must be prepared. This goes beyond simply reading the book. 

Have a 5-star Discussion!!

Once you have finished another member’'s selection, and are ready to prepare for the meeting, read over the book club questions. 

Which ones lend themselves best to the book you’'ve just finished? Remember, you don'’t have to ask and answer every single question! You may find that with some books you can answer them all, and with others you may focus on only one or two. If you use the book club questions as a guide, you'’ll create a focus for the group discussion.

Using Discussion questions to shape your book club meeting

Whether meeting in person or virtually, you can shape the meeting with the questions you ask.  Some of these may overlap with the fiction and nonfictions lists (see columns) which is fine!  We are presenting them to you in order of a typical meeting format so you can do the same if it fits your style.

For the Start of the Meeting:

1. Did the story pull you in immediately, or did you have a hard time getting into the book?

2. Did you like the author’s writing style?

3. How did this book make you feel?

4. Did this book make you think differently about anything? Did it introduce you to a new point of view, or any new concepts?

5. Was this book what you expected it would be, based on the summary?

To Ramp Up the Conversation & Engage Everyone:

1. Did any passages in particular stand out to you? 

2. Did you relate to any of the characters?

3. Did any of the characters make you upset or angry?

4. How did the story’s setting and time period affect the story? 

5. Do the characters have depth? Did you feel you knew them?

6. Was the story original? What makes this book different from other books in the same genre?

7. What was happening in the world when this book was published? Did that affect the book?

8. Do you think the author’s age, culture or upbringing had any impact on the book?

9. Why do you think the author chose to narrate this book the way they did (first person, third person, one viewpoint, multiple viewpoints, etc.)? Was the narrator reliable?

To Wrap-up Your Discussion:

1. Why do you think the author wrote this book? What do you think they wanted readers to get out of it?

2. What do you think was the biggest theme or message?

3. Would you recommend this book to someone else?

4. Would you read another book by this author?

5. Was the book the right length? Were there any parts you wanted the author to expand on, or sections you thought should be shorter?

6. Do you have questions for the author?

7. Did you like the book’s ending? Why or why not?

8. Did anyone else’s thoughts, or the discussion you just had change the way you felt about the book?

Finished up with this page?  Return to our  home page  to continue on your book club journey.  Or, jump to our BEST OF trBCQ list!

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Fiction Discussion Questions 

• Which character do you like the most and why? The least and why? 
• What passage from the book stood out to you? 
• Are there situations and/or characters you can identify with, if so how? 
• Did you learn something you didn'’t know before? 
• Do you feel as if your views on a subject have changed by reading this text? 
• Have you had a life changing revelation from reading this text? 
• What major emotion did the story evoke in you as a reader? 
• At what point in the book did you decide if you liked it or not? What helped make this decision? 
• Name your favorite thing overall about the book. Your least favorite? 
• If you could change something about the book what would it be and why? 
• Describe what you liked or disliked about the writer’s style?

Reading Nonfiction? Any of these can modified for nonfiction. For example, if you are reading a biography, question one could be changed to say “'of all the people who were involved in the main person's life, who did you like the most and why? The least?”' 

Pages to Visit

Did you end up visiting us for one reason or another, and then get sidetracked with all these great ideas?!  Don't worry, it happens to us ALL.THE.TIME.

Here are a few stops to make on your tour of theRealBookClubQueen:

Help with Choosing a Book

While previewing a potential book choice, do you think at least  three  of the questions have the potential to generate a good discussion? 

If your answer is no, be careful about making it your book club selection. It may be a book you want to read on your own, but not one that is suitable for a reading group. 

If your answer is yes, chances are the group discussion will be excellent and meaningful!

Check out more guidelines for choosing a book !

Nonfiction Discussion Questions These questions aim at the general nonfiction book. (Parenthesis) indicate specific nonfiction genres.

• Did you admire or detest this person? Why? (Biography or Autobiography) 
• What life lesson can be learned from this event or story? (General Nonfiction) 
• Did the book read like a story, a newspaper article, a report, something else? Give examples. (General Nonfiction) 
• What one new fact did you learn from reading this book? (General Nonfiction) 
• What was the motivation for the writing of this book? (General but great for Bio or Auto Bio) 
• Did you feel this book truly belonged in the nonfiction genre? (Memoir) 
• Was the point of the book to share an opinion, explain a topic, tell about a personal journey, or something else? Did the author do it well? (General Nonfiction) 
• What part of this book inspired you in some way? Explain. (Motivational, Self Help) 
• Will you read other books by this author? Why or why not? (General Nonfiction) 
• Did this book change your life in a positive or negative way? Explain (General Nonfiction)

Are you looking for questions for a specific genre?  If so, try our themed discussion questions .

Can't find a set of questions that fits your needs?   Contact us and we can help!

An interesting thing that we've experienced over the years, and in multiple clubs no less, is that a book that the MAJORITY of us come to the meeting getting ready to tell everyone we didn't like, end up becoming one of our BEST discussions!

Here are some of those titles that really got the conversation going:

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